Accenture had to re-train 17,000 employees because automation ate their jobs

• Accenture re-trained 17,000 employees globally as automation performed the majority of tasks.
  
• A McKinsey Global Institute report has shown that automation will cost India a major transition in jobs over the next 10 years — mostly the clerical and administrative job roles.
  
• The move has helped the company since it didn’t have to hire new people and gave a chance to explore the capabilities of existing employees.

The threat of automation replacing traditional jobs is increasingly becoming a pressing concern for organisations with many trying to prepare their employees for the transition.

Recently, the technology giant Accenture retrained 17,000 people globally as automation took over majority of their tasks. The back-end processing staff has reportedly been offered or deployed in new job roles.

Accenture’s India operations, which mainly include credit card and mortgage application processing, have been automated with Artificial intelligence and virtual chatbots, according to a ZDNet report.

Earlier, the company had 110,000 people onboard to perform the same tasks that have now been automated. However, this has given the company an edge over other in terms of new hires and their training, Amit Bansal, Accenture’s Managing Director, analytics delivery lead APAC told ZDNet.

While the company hasn’t disclosed the nature of the new jobs, in the past other IT majors have also sought to retrain and redeploy staff in other areas. For instance, in 2015, Wipro retrained 75,000 in Artificial Intelligence and cognitive technologies under its project NextGen. Of this, the employees that did not qualify for the digital business remained in the technology sector, Wipro CEO, Abidali Z. Neemuchwala told Livemint.

A recent report by McKinsey Global Institute has shown that automation will cost India a major transition in jobs over the next 10 years — mostly the clerical and in-service jobs including administrative positions. This shift in roles will affect nearly 11 million working women in India.

However, with the advent of automation and new algorithms, many new job roles have been introduced. This is expected to create 133 million new opportunities in the job market, according to the World Economic Forum.

Accenture was recently ranked first on the HFS research top ten report for Google AI Services 2019 based on the innovation, execution and client feedback on the Google Artificial Intelligence.

See also:
Automation will affect women the most in the Indian job market: Report

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